Tomgram: Ann Jones, Can Women Make Peace?

January 13, 2011
 Last week, Pentagon budget “cuts” were in the headlines, often almost luridly so -- “Pentagon Faces the Knife,” “Pentagon to Cut Spending by $78 Billion, Reduce Troop Strength,” “U.S. Aims to Cut Defense Budget and Slash Troops.”  Responding to the mood of the moment in Washington (“the fiscal pressures the country is facing”), Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen made those headlines by calling a news conference to explain prospective “cuts” they were proposing.  Summing the situation up, Mullen seconded Gates this way: “The secretary's right, we can't hold ourselves exempt from the belt-tightening.”
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Today, just to shake things up a tad, TomDispatch offers some actual new thinking of a sort you won’t find in Washington.  It's from Ann Jones, a hands-on aid worker, TomDispatch regular, and remarkable writer.  Her eloquent new book, War Is Not Over When It’s Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War, will undoubtedly go largely unreviewed, because when wars “end” even as the destruction of women (and children) continues, it’s no longer really news. 

Worse yet, she favors the “less” path in Afghanistan, where any path heading vaguely in the direction of “peace” (a word now synonymous with “utopian dolt” or “bleeding heart idiot”) will automatically be waved aside as hopeless.  Since putting any money behind thinking about or testing out new pathways towards peace in our world is inconceivable, we’ll never know what might work.  You can put $130 million taxpayer dollars into a new aircraft-fueling system at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or billions of taxpayer dollars into the Pakistani military (defending a country in which the rich go notoriously untaxed), but not one cent for peace.   As for women, well, too bad.  (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Jones discusses why wars never end for women and girls, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.) Tom
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http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175340/tomgram:_ann_jones,_can_women_make_peace/

Stephanie Doty
Women’s Issues Matter
August 11, 2014
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0